WILBRAHAM, Mass. - Wilbraham's first standalone senior center that's currently under construction will be able to provide more opportunities for the town's rapidly growing elderly population.

"We're presently located inside the YMCA building," said senior center director Paula Dubord. "We have a little over 3,000 square feet of office space and activity space here now and our new building is going to have over 15,000 square feet. So we're going to have the ability to offer so many more programs, activities and services to our seniors."

Dubord said the building project has cost $13 million. The town is using its ARPA funds as well as fundraisers to help raise money for the facility.

It's a big job, but Dubord said the finished product will be worth it.

"We're going to have a full commercial kitchen and the ability to offer a daily lunch program for folks," Dubord said. "We also are going to have a dedicated fitness room with fitness equipment. We presently have some fitness equipment in a room, but it's shared space so it's only available when there's nothing else is going on.

"We're going to have two regulation size pool tables for folks, game room, library, places where people can just come hang out which we don't have right now."

Dubord said the Wilbraham veteran service center which resides in the current senior center will be moving into the new facility as well. She said the number of seniors is growing, so having a larger facility will go a long way.

"Donahue Institute of UMass had predicted that we would be really reaching about 40% of our population would be seniors when we hit 2020, and they were on the mark," Dubord said. "We are just a few seniors shy of 5,000 seniors in Wilbraham and our total population is 14,000. So we're really looking forward to serving those folks appropriately in a new state of the art building."

The new Wilbraham Senior Center is expected to open in March of next year.